by Peter Watts
Oh God what is that—
Some unaffordable, awestruck piece of her brain murmered it can't be but it was, black and toothless and wide enough to swallow legions: a gaping mouth in the building's side. She tried to ignore it as they fell past, forced herself to focus on the floors beneath, count from the ground up. They were diving straight past that impossible maw—they were diving into it—
"Le—"
"Now!" she yelled.
For a second that went on forever, Lubin did nothing at all.
The strangest sensations, in that elastic moment. The sound of the rotor, still impossibly awhirl through luck or magic or sheer stubborn denial, its machine-gun rhythm dopplered down like the slow, distant heartbeat of a receding astronaut. The sight of the ground racing up to spike them into oblivion. Sudden calm resignation, a recognition of the inevitable: we're going to die. And a nod, sadly amused, to the irony that the mighty Ken Lubin, who always thought ten steps ahead, could have made such a stupid fucking mistake.
But then he yanked on the stick and the chopper reared back, losing its nerve at the last moment. Suddenly she weighed a hundred tonnes. They faced the sky; the world skidded around them, earth and glass and far-off cloud rolling past the windshield in a blurry jumble. For one astonishing moment they hovered. Then something kicked them hard from behind: from behind, the sound of cracking polymers and tearing metal. They lurched sideways and that magical rotor slashed the earth and stopped dead, defeated at last. Lenie Clarke stared up mad-eyed at a great monolith leaning crazily against the night sky, descending along with the darkness to devour her.
"Lenie."
She opened her eyes. That impossible mouth still yawned overhead. She squeezed her eyes shut, held them closed for a second. Tried again.
Oh.
Not a mouth after all. A great charred hole, partway up the north façade, stretching across ten gutted floors or more.
Rio, she realized. They never repaired the damage.
The roof of the building was clearly visible, straight ahead through the forward windshield. The lights up there had gone out. The whole building seemed to lean to the left; the chopper's nose was twisted up at a thirty-degree angle, like some mechanical mole that had breached from the earth and torqued on its axis.
Their ride was sockeye. The tail boom must have either crumpled at their backs or snapped off entirely.
Pain in her chest and arms. There was something wrong with the sky. It was—that was it, it was dark. They were in a clave, where static-field generators hummed endless electricity into the air. Sudbury's sky should have been flickering. Before they'd fallen, it had been.
"Lenie."
"Was that—was that a pulse?" she wondered.
"Can you move?"
She focused, and located the source of the pain: Lubin's backpack, hard and lumpy, clutched tightly as life itself against her chest. It must have risen from the floor during the dive, she must have grabbed it in midair. She remembered none of it. The slit along its top puckered like a mouth in her embrace, affording glimpses of the stuff inside—an angular jumble of tools and ordnance pressing painfully into her flesh.
She willed her grip to relax. The pain subsided.
"I think I'm okay. Are you—"
He looked blindly back at her through sandblasted eyes.
An image from the fall came to her, unregistered until now: Lubin's pince-nez, sailing gracefully towards the back of the cabin. Clarke unbuckled and twisted to look behind her. Sudden sharp pain splintered down her spine like cracking ice. She cried out.
Lubin's hand was on her shoulder. "What?"
"Wh—whiplash, I think. I've had worse." She settled back in her seat. No point in looking for the pince-nez anyway; the pulse would have fried them as thoroughly as it had the chopper.
"You're blind again," she said softly.
"I packed another pair. The knapsack's shielded."
Its open mouth grinned at her, zipper-toothed. Realization crashed over her in a sickening wave. "Oh, fuck, Ken, I—I forgot to zip it up. I'm—"
He waved away her apology. "You'll be my eyes. Is the cabin breached?"
"What?"
"Any breaks in the fuselage? Anything big enough for you to crawl through, say?"
"Uh—" Clarke turned again, carefully. Pain feinted to the base of her skull, but stopped short of outright attack. "No. The rear bulkhead's crumpled to shit, but..."
"Good. Do you still have the pack?"
She opened her mouth to answer—and remembered two carbonised mounds staring into the sky.
"Focus, Len. Do you—"
"It doesn't matter, Ken."
"It matters a great—"
"We're dead, Ken." She took a deep, despairing breath. "He's got an orbital cannon, remember? Any second now he'll just—and there's not a fucking thing we can—"
"Listen to me." Suddenly, Lubin was close enough to kiss. "If he was trying to kill us we'd be dead already, do you understand? I'd doubt he's even willing to bring his satellites online at this point; he doesn't want to risk losing them to the shredders."
"But he already—the pulse—"
"Didn't come from orbit. He must have packed half the floors in that building with capacitors. He's not trying to kill us. He's only trying to soften us up." He thrust out his hand. "Now where's the pack?"
She handed it over, numbly. Lubin set it on his knee and rummaged inside.
He's not trying to kill us. Lubin had made that claim before, laid it out as part of his working hypothesis en route from Toromilton. Clarke wasn't entirely sure that recent events bore him out, especially since—
A flicker of motion, just to the right. Clarke turned and gasped, the pain of that motion forgotten in an instant. A monstrous face stared back through the bubble of the canopy, centimeters away, a massive black wedge of muscle and bone. Small dark eyes glinted from deep sockets. The apparition grinned, showing sawtooth serrations embedded in jaws like a leghold trap.
In the next moment it had dropped out of sight.
"What?" Lubin's face panned back and forth. "What do you see?"
"I—I think it used to be a dog," Clarke said, her voice quavering.
"I think they all did," Lubin told her.
Tilted at the sky, she hadn't seen them arrive; she had to look down to see forward, and now—through the ventral bubble between her knees, over the edge of the door if she strained from her seat—the darkness seethed on all sides. The apparitions did not bark or growl. They made no sound at all. They didn't waste energy on brute animal rage, didn't throw themselves slavering against the hull to get at the soft meat inside. They circled like silent sharks.
Boosted light stripped nothing from these creatures. They were utterly black.
"How many?" Lubin ran one hand across his grenade pistol; the ammo belt lay across his knees, one end still trailing down into the knapsack between his feet.
"Twenty. Thirty. At least. Oh Jesus, Ken, they're huge, they're twice as big as you are..." Clarke fought rising panic.
Lubin's pistol came with three cartridge slots and a little thumbwheel to choose between them. He felt out flash, shipworm, and clusterfuck from the belt and slotted them in. "Can you see the main entrance?"
"Yes."
"What direction? How far?"
"About eleven o'clock. Maybe—maybe eighty meters." Might as well be eighty lightyears.
"What's between there and here?"
She swallowed. "A pack of rabid monster dogs waiting to kill us."
"Besides that."
"We're—we're on the edge of the main drag. Paved. Old foundations either side, pretty much razed and filled." And then, hoping he wasn't heading where she feared—hoping she could deflect him if he was—she added, "No cover."
"Can you see my binocs?"
She turned carefully, torsion and injury in uneasy balance. "Right behind you. The strap's caught up in the cleat over the door."
He abandoned his weapon long enough to
disentangle the binoculars and hand them over. "Describe the entrance."
Range-finding and thermal were dead, of course. Only the raw optics still worked. Clarke tried to ignore the dark shapes in the blurry foreground. "Bank of glass doors, eight of them. They're set into this shallow indentation in the façade, CSIRA logo on top. Ken—"
"What's behind the doors?"
"Uh, a vestibule, a few meters deep. And then—oh, last time there was another set of doors further in, but those're gone now. There's some kind of heavy slab instead, like a big dropgate or something. Looks pretty featureless."
"What about the side walls of the vestibule?"
"Concrete or biolite or something. Just walls. Nothing special. Why?"
He tightened the ammo belt around his waist. "That's where we go in."
She shook her head. "No, Ken. No fucking way."
"Dropgate's the obvious defense. More sensible to go around than hit it head-on."
"We can't go out there. They'll tear us apart."
"I didn't come all this way to let a pack of dogs pin me down eighty meters from the finish line."
"Ken, you're blind!"
"They won't know that." He held up his pistol. "And they'll know what this is. Appearances matter."
She stared at his corroded eyes, the oozing flesh of his face. "How're you going to aim?"
"The same way we landed. You'll give me bearings." Lubin felt around in the pack and pulled out the Heckler & Koch. "Take this."
She did, unbelieving.
"We keep the dogs back long enough to get in through the wall. The rest of the plan doesn't change."
Dry-mouthed, Clarke watched them circling. "What if they're armored? What if they're wired?"
"They'll be pulse-proof. No electronics. The usual tweaks and nothing more." He zipped up the knapsack and slung it across his back, tightening the straps around shoulders and waist.
"Are these guns pulse-proof? Are—" A sudden, disquieting memory rose to the surface of her thoughts: machinery in her chest, hiccoughing. "What about our implants?"
"Myoelectric. EMP doesn't bother them, much. What's the H&K set on?"
She checked. "Conotoxins. Ken, I've never even fired a gun before. My aim—"
"Will be better than mine." Lubin clambered back down into the tilted cabin behind their seats. "You may get off easily. I rather suspect they'll be focusing on me."
"But—"
"Gloves," he said, sealing his to the gauntlets beneath his clothing.
Clarke pulled her gloves over shaking hands. "Ken, we can't just—"
He paused, fixed her with his sightless eyes. "You know, I liked you better when you were suicidal. You weren't nearly so chickenshit."
She blinked. "What?"
"I'm losing patience, Len. Five years of guilt-ridden self-pity should be enough for anyone. Was I wrong about you? Were you just wallowing, all this time? Do you want to save the world or not?"
"I—"
"This is the only way."
Is there anything you wouldn't do, then? For the chance to take it all back? Back then the answer had been obvious. It was obvious now. Freezing, familiar determination reignited inside her. Her face burned.
Lubin nodded, only his eyes blinded. He sat on the floor, braced his back against the bulkhead behind Clarke's seat. "Noseplugs."
They'd improvised them en route, little wads of the same semipermeable tape that blocked her intake. Clarke stuffed one up each nostril.
"I blow a hole in the hull," Lubin said, inserting his own. "That drives the dogs back long enough for us to exit the chopper. Once we're outside, point me at the main entrance. That's twelve o'clock. All target bearings will be relative to that, not to where I happen to be facing at any given time. Do you understand?"
She nodded, forgetting for an instant, then: "Yes."
"They'll charge as soon as we're in the open. Call it. Close your eyes when I give the word. I'll be using the flash grenades; they'll be incapacitated for at least ten seconds. Shoot as many as you can. Keep moving."
"Got it. Anything else?"
"Lose the gloves once we're free of the heat. The sight of a diveskin might start him thinking."
Patient killers paced just past the canopy. They seemed to look her in the eye. They smiled, showing teeth the size of thumbs.
Just the usual tweaks, she thought, giddy and terrified. She braced her back against the canopy, raising her gloved hands to protect her face.
"We can do this," Lubin said softly. "Just remember what I told you."
He's not trying to kill us. She wondered just who that applied to.
"You really think he expects us to survive."
Lubin nodded.
"But does he know you're blind?"
"I doubt it." He pointed his gun across the cabin. The thumbwheel locked onto clusterfuck. "Ready?"
This is it, Lenie girl. Your one shot at redemption.
Don't fuck it up.
"Go," she said, and shut her eyes.
Lubin fired. Clarke's lids glowed sudden, bloody orange.
Her diveskin took most of the heat from the neck down, but in that moment it was as if someone had thrust her head into a kiln. She swore the heat blasted the very skin from her face. She clenched her teeth and held her breath and cursed the chances Lubin wouldn't take: it might tip him off if he sees our hoods.
The air roared and crackled, sizzled with spatterings of liquid metal. She could hear the crack of Lubin's pistol firing again at her side. She realised, distantly amazed, that the pain was gone. Fear and adrenaline had swept it away in an instant.
The world dimmed beyond her eyelids. She opened them. A hole gaped in the side of the chopper. Soft alloy glowed intermittently at its edges; acrylic peeled and blackened. Chunks of shredded canopy guttered on the floor, one scant centimeters from her left foot.
Lubin fired a third time. A spread of incendiary needles shot through the breach and into the darkness beyond, a tiny, devastating meteor shower. Clusterfucks were designed to sow a thousand lethal pinholes across a wide area, but there'd been little chance to disperse across the meager width of the cabin. Almost two meters of solid fuselage had been reduced to silvery chaff and blown outward; a fan of dispersed wreckage steamed and congealed on the ground outside.
"How big is the hole?" Lubin snapped over ambience.
"Meter and a half." She choked and coughed on the stink of scorched plastic. "Lots of little bits past—"
Too late. Lubin, blindly brazen, had already launched himself through the hole. He sailed over the scree nearest the threshold and hit the ground shoulder-first, rolling to his feet in an instant. A lozenge of hot metal smoldered like a branding iron against his left shoulder blade. Lubin writhed, reached around and pushed it loose with the muzzle of his gun. It dropped to the ground, tarry with half-melted copolymer. A ragged hole smoked on Lubin's shirt. The injured diveskin beneath squirmed as if alive.
Clarke gritted her teeth and dove after him.
A bright spark of pain, needle-sharp and needle-fine, ignited briefly on her forearm as she sailed through the breach. In the next instant blesséd cool air washed over her. She landed hard and skidded. Two great carcasses twitched and burned before her, grinning behind charred lips.
She scrambled to her feet, peeling off her gloves. Sure enough, the rest of the pack had retreated for the moment, holding the perimeter at a more discreet distance.
Lubin swept his weapon back and forth, pure threat display. "Lenie!"
"Here! Two down!" She reached his side, pointing her H&K at the circling horde. "The others backed off." She turned him clockwise. "Entrance that way. Twelve o'clock." Remember, she told herself. Bearings from the entrance, bearings from the—
He nodded. "How far are the dogs?" He held his pistol two-handed, arms extended, elbows slightly bent. He looked almost relaxed.
"Uh—twenty-five meters, maybe." Bearings from the entrance...
"Smart. Just past effective range.
"
Bearings from—"Your range is twenty-five lousy meters?"
"Wide spread." It made sense, of course—a useful cheat for a poor marksman, and blind was as poor as it got. The catch was a needle-cloud so widely dispersed that distant targets passed through it untouched. "Try yours."
Clarke aimed. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. She fired once, twice. The H&K bucked in her grip. Its bark was surprisingly soft.
The enemy stared back, undiminished.
"Missed. Unless they're immune, Ken, you said they were tweaked—"
Sudden motion to the right, a rush along the flank. "Two o'clock," Clarke hissed, firing. Lubin turned and shot a firestorm of needles. "Eight!" He swung and fired again, barely missing Clarke as she ducked beneath his outstretched arms.
Splinters of fire laced the ground to both sides. Three more dogs were down, lacerated by flaming shrapnel. Two more, fitfully ignited, fled back out of range. Still the pack was mute. The perimeter boiled with silent anger.
She kept her own weapon up, for all the good it would do. "Three down, two injured. The rest of them are holding back."
Lubin panned left, right. "This is wrong. They should be charging."
"They don't want to get shot. You said they were smart."
"Attack dogs too smart to attack." Lubin shook his head. "No. This is wrong."
"Maybe they just want to keep us pinned here," Clarke said hopefully. "Maybe—"
Something rang faintly in her skull, not so much heard as felt: an itch, shrill and irritating.
"Ah," Lubin said softly. "That's more like it."
The change was too subtle for sight and too fundamental. No motion sensor, no image-analysis subroutine would have been able to read the signs. But Lenie Clarke knew it instantly, on some primal level that predated Humanity itself. Something in the gut had never forgotten, in all these million years. On all sides, many creatures merged suddenly together into one, into a vast seething entity with myriad bodies and a single merciless focus. Lenie Clarke watched it leap towards her and remembered exactly what she was, what she always had been.